The Game

Kramer, Jack and Deford, Frank. The Game: My 40 years in Tennis. New York: Putnam 1979. Print.

First Sentences:

 

While I have spent a great deal of my life traveling -- and still do, to my wife's annoyance -- I live a very settled life in many respects. 

Description:

Since attending the Tennis Hall of Fame ceremony last summer at the classic tennis casino in Newport, Rhode Island, my interest has been peaked about the history of tennis, especially the early days of the original rag-tag pro tours and the evolution to Open tournaments. To satisfy my curiosity I went right to the source: writing by the men who led the first pro circuits and eventually championed the switch to Open tennis (where pros could play with amateurs in Grand Slam and other tournaments). Those two men were Jack Kramer (early professional player and pro tour organizer) and Richard Evans (writer, mover and shaker for Open tennis - a link to his book is below). 

 

I started with Jack Kramer (with Frank Deford) and his fascinating, insightful, cocky, and thoughtful account of his life as one of the first tennis professionals, The Game: My 40 Years in Tennis. The famous names of tennis legend just flow out of his story-telling, some familiar and some relatively unknown today. Pancho Gonzales, Bobby Riggs, Don Budge, John Newcombe, Tony Roche, Rod Laver, and Ken Rosewall I knew about. Figures lesser remembered by me, but still great players are fleshed out  by Kramer as his worthy playing opponents and friends: Ellsworth Vines, Pancho Segura, Bitsy Grant, Bob Falkenberg, Gussy Moran, Helen Wills Moody, Pauline Betz Addie, Frank Parker, Fred Perry, and Gardnar Mulloy. Don't worry if you don't recognize some of these players either; Kramer will help you picture them as he weaves them into tournament and travel stories throughout his captivating memoir. And he carefully analyzes them all. And in the end, he lets you know who was the best (besides himself): Don Budge.

It's difficulty to compare players you did see in their prime. But then it's difficult to compare players you did see in their prime, because rarely did two of the best have their best years at the same time 

Kramer played them all. In his amateur days at the L.A. Tennis Club, he developed a serve-and-volley power game, learning to play strategic, percentage tennis which involved using strong forehand and backhand strokes, conserving energy, and never losing his serve. It was "a man's game" as he called it, while his amateur opponents played a more conservative "boy's game." Kramer won ten Grand Slam men's singles, doubles, and mixed titles in the U.S. Championship (now The Open) and Wimbledon from 1941-47, as well as led the U.S to Davis Cup victories in 1946 and '47.

 

At that time, top amateurs survived on appearance money paid under the table by the tournament promoters to assure a good field of players which would attract paying customers.

In the winter the best a top player could make was about $400 a week in Florida...for a good Texas tournament the Number 1 player might get $750, and for the Pacific Southwest in L.A....the top could draw as much as $1,200. 

With no other goals to conquer after winning Wimbledon for the second time and seeking to be paid for his tennis efforts, Kramer joined Riggs' tour of professionals after being offered $50,000 guaranteed or 35% of the gate receipts. The book then focuses on these fledgling tour pros, their lives on the road, the competitions and rugged conditions they faced each night, the uncertain finances, and the players' subsequent ostracization from all major tournaments because they were now paid professionals, not amateurs.

 

Since he played against them all, Kramer is perfectly suited to analyze the major players of that era, both professional and amateur: their personalities, strengths and weaknesses of their games, and the demands on their mental capabilities of grueling competition. For example, he comments on the great Spaniard Alex Olmedo, a dominate figure in the amateurs:

Then Olmedo signed with me, and he could hardly win a set. All of a sudden, from the top of the world to being a stiff -- number nine or ten out of twelve players on the tour...Nothing in the world prepares you for losing day in and day out, and surely it is a hundred times worse to be losing every time when just last week you were the champion. It tears you apart. 

Later, as the Executive Director of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), Kramer oversaw the 1973 boycott of Wimbledon, which, in his words, was "the only time in the history of any sport...where the players have boycotted the world championship." This event led to the open tennis era, where previous futile efforts to get the best (pro) players in the same tournament as the amateurs had failed.

 

He also has strong opinions on such wide-ranging topics as:

• The Battle of the Sexes between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs - "Riggs...figured [after he beat Margaret Court] he could beat any of the dames without training...he completely miscalculated Billie Jean, who has always risen to the occasion; 
   
• World Team Tennis - Could never succeed on the grand scale it sought because tennis is too much an individual sport; (Note: Riggs and Kramer tried to form a similar WTT league in 1950, but "arena owners had no interest since there were not enough name pros to stock a league.")

• The then-new metal racquets - A marketing advance, not a competitive one;

• Practice techniques - Kids today never practice to improve their weaknesses, What they call practice is really just warming up.

It's a fantastic book, full of tennis history, personalities, competition, and opinions from the man who lived them during those early professional days. Highly recommended for anyone interested in any aspect of tennis and the people who shaped in on and off the court. 

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Evans, Richard. Open Tennis: The First Twenty Years, the Players, the Politics, the Pressures, the Passions, and the Great Matches

   

Inside view from Evans (who was a key participant) about the background, negotiations, administrators, directors, and players involved with making tennis tournaments open to professionals and amateurs alike.

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 470 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

My First Hundred Years

Murray, Margaret. My First Hundred Years. London: William Kimber 1963. Print.

First Sentences:

I always think that an autobiography should begin with some account of the forebears and immediate family of the writer so that one can understand some of the early influences which have affected the writer and have helped to make him what he is. My ancestral tree is a very short one going back to only one set of great-great-grandparents, about two hundred. I have quite undistinguished lineage...

Description:

I sought out Margaret Murray's autobiography My First Hundred Years after reading The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilivie, and discovered Murray was a contributor of more than 5,000 entries to the original Oxford English Dictionary. The words and definitions she sent to the editors (after the call went out to the general public for assistance in finding new items), focused on India where she was born and spent much of her life, as well as her field of Egyptology and also witchcraft. Better still, I found OED contributor Murray had written her autobiography at age 100, something I felt would be extremely interesting to peruse.

And she did not disappoint. Her memory is remarkable for a centenarian (or for anyone for that matter), and her writing style exquisite: free-flowing, descriptive, chatty, and full of interesting details of life as a woman archeologist in that very new field.

Born and raised in Calcutta, India, to wealthy parents, Murray was educated in London where she became interested in archeology, a class she only had taken on a whim. The professor, Sir William Petrie, a pioneer of the new field of Egyptology, took Murray under his wing. She edited and illustrated his writings, eventually accompanying Petrie to Egypt as a site nurse. There she absorbed his methods and discoveries at various sites and soon grew to be a qualified archeologist in her own right. She became a teacher of Egyptian linguists and translator of hieroglyphics at the University of London.

What I loved about her recollections was her attention to details and personal feelings. She related memories of the visit to India of the Prince of Wales, where attending Maharajahs competed to out-dazzle each other in their dress. For example, the Maharajah of Patiala wore a coat with "fronts, color, cuffs, and hem embroidered with gold thread and peals, [and] round his neck he wore at least four graduated rows of diamonds, the longest reaching nearly to his waist."

Her early home life included eating with small silver cutlery (larger ones were never adopted by her father) and, at the end of the meal, having the visiting servants of the invited diners carefully frisked for any valuable spoons they might have pocketed. Her mother encouraged a broad education without focus on a single subject, a technique that so limited Murray's brilliant sister Mary she never could focus on one skill and thus was unable to rise to her potential in piano, mathematics, or language. Murray also recalled tales of the horrific Indian Mutiny as related by her grandmother.

As an Egyptologist, Murray translated inscriptions found in tombs, uncovered a major temple to Osiris constructed by the Pharaoh Seti I, and was the first woman to unwrap an Egyptian mummy. 

Murray later became an ardent supporter of women rights and suffrage, including pushing for acceptance of women in academia and archeology. She expanded her on-going interest in folklore to include witchcraft, a topic on which she wrote many books as well as the entry for the Encyclopedia Britannica on that topic.

Hers was an amazing life, one that is now available to lucky readers to delve into the world of nineteenth century India and twentieth century (and centuries-earlier) Egypt. I was totally fascinated to "listen" to her recall story after story, detail after detail, of the worlds she knew and was eager to share. A lively, lovely story of an important woman's world and achievements. 

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Ogilivie, Sarah. The Dictionary People.    

Carefully details the lives of those people from the general public who contributed words, definitions, and sources for terms to be included in the original Oxford Dictionary. (previously reviewed here)

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 465 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

The Racket

Niland, Conor. The Racket: On Tour with Tennis's Golden Generation -- and the Other 99%. Dublin, Ireland: Sandycove (Penguin). 2025. Print.

First Sentences:

 

Behind every successful tennis player is a parent who refused to allow them to quit. I was ten when I first told my folks that I wanted to give it all up. They didn't yield then, and they never did. Tennis was our family business, and the stakes were made clear to me when I was young. 

Description:

I used to play a lot of tennis, from age eight through college and later as a teaching professional internationally. But never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I had the game, physicality, or mentality to compete on any professional level. Without formal lessons, playing rag-tag survival tennis with "interesting" shots (my Turn-Around-Jump-Reverse-Spin serve comes to mind), I knew early on there were way too many levels above me to delude myself into pursuing a playing career. But teaching tennis was for me a different story, one I could excel at and really loved.

For Conor Niland, an Irish tennis player in the early 1980s through the late 1990s, the professional dream was his reality. At least it was for his parents and subsequently his two older siblings who trained and joined the professional circuit. 

 

Niland's recent autobiography, The Racket: On Tour with Tennis's Golden Generation -- and the Other 99%, relates his ambitious climbs from playing on his backyard court under the stern instruction of his parents, through college in the United States, and then into the Futures Circuit (now ITF World Tennis Tour) for players ranked 500 or lower in the world. 

 

His first goal was to break away from the lowly Futures up into the Challenger Tour (for players ranked 100-500) and ideally into the elite ATP Tour of the top players ranked 1-100. Niland explains that each win in any tourney gave him ATP points, helping improve his ranking and placement in upcoming tournaments. A high enough ranking allowed him to enter the next prestigious level of tournaments with more luxuries, prize money and ATP points available.

I grew to like the atmosphere around the house on the morning of a final, my senses were always heightened. From the moment you woke up, every sound appeared that little bit sharper: the spoon hitting the cereal bowl, the bread popping out of the toaster. Everyone was dressed more smartly, and spoke in a quieter, softer tone.

Junior training had its ups and down for Niland. At twelve, he beat an unknown Roger Federer in straight sets. Later, when training at the Nick Bollettieri IMG Academy for two weeks, he noted that the facility is "a tennis zoo: kids are kept caged in courts all day and fed tennis balls," although the Academy did develop players including Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, Jim Courier, and Maria Sharapova.

His climb from the backyard upward, recounted on a tournament by tournament basis, reveals the trials and tribulations of a young player on his way up (hopefully), the goals he achieves along the way as well as the blown opportunities that might have helped him. His lifestyle and behavior are also laid out as he struggles with decisions faced both on-court and off. He recalls practice hitting sessions or matches with great players like Andy Murray, the Williams sisters, Andy Roddick and many others now lost in tennis obscurity. Along the way, Niland provides astute, fascinating comments about each player. 

It's not exactly right to say that the very top guys like Djokovic hit the ball much harder....But they hit it deeper, right to the baseline, and they do it relentlessly. It doesn't look like a big difference on TV, but that extra foot and a half of depth, over and over, is a killer. This didn't so much put me under pressure as put me under siege.

Traveling 35 weeks a year, he had no time for social relationships with women or player s concentrating on their own struggles to survive. Sometimes he played nine tournaments in ten weeks, flying all over the world from Doha to Chennai to Montreal to Switzerland to Banja Luka and on and on and on.

Expenses are also always in his mind. Can he afford  to pay a coach who could free him from the tedious requirements of finding hitting partners, give him professionals training and advice, and provide companionship as Niland travels weekly from country to country? How can he deal with the pressure of competition, knowing that a win would secure necessary funds and ATP points (not to mention necessities like travel expenses, equipment, and food), while a loss would lower his ranking? 

Along the way he also discusses his encounters with physiotherapists, gambling on matches, banned substances, sideline coaching, tennis parents, qualifying tourneys, wildcard entrances to the main draw, and even food poisoning at an inopportune moment.

 

I was totally involved with Conor Niland's life, his ambitions, his frustrations, and his day-to-day, tournament-to-tournament lifestyle. When he succeeded, I felt elation. When he stumbled (choked?), I honestly felt bad for him, a player I previously had never heard of.

There were matches in my career in which it felt as though what was at stake was not merely qualification, but my identity too....How long was I going to give it? I was going to give it years if it meant getting a few great hours in return.

Highly recommended for an insider's look into the everyday adder to tennis success and the impending slide back down that also awaits every player at every level.

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

McPhee, John. Levels of the Game.   

Point by point analysis of the 1978 US Open tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. McPhee takes readers inside the players' minds as they devise strategies, relish successes, and overcome missed opportunities. Provides the background and personalities which influence each player's shot selection, strategy, and mental game.

 

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 435 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

  

Jim Murray: An Autobiography

Murray, Jim. Jim Murray, An Autobiography. New York: MacMillan 1993. Print.

First Sentences:

I was a Depression child. With all that connotes. That means you never trust the system again. You know what can happen to it. That means you  go through life never able to fully enjoy it. That means you have a ever-present sense of foreboding....I never quit a job in a huff. I swallowed guff. I don't recommend it. It's just the way I was.

 

Description:

Growing up in Southern California in the 1950s through the '70s, every day for me started with reading Jim Murray's sports column in the Los Angeles Times. He introduced me to the back stories of athletes, games, and sports history, all with wry wit and biting comments that made sports so much richer. What a wonderful introduction for a kid into the world of great writing, humor, and sports (or even today as an adult).

I recently discovered Murray had written his autobiography, cleverly titled: Jim Murray: An Autobiography. In this fast-paced book, Murray only sparingly writes about himself beyond his early life, preferring to focus on stories about the sports figures he had encountered and the condition of various sports themselves. 

Notable among the few stories about his youth are recollections about when he saw Babe Ruth hit a homer, or arranged neighborhood boxing matches among kids, or learned about the reality of sports from his Uncle Ed:

Never take money from an amateur -- unless he insists ...

Never play cards with a man with dark glasses or his own deck ...

Never make change for a guy on a train ... 

Murray prefers to throw the spotlight on the athletes he encountered and commentary on various sports throughout his career on the LA Times, Time, Life, and Sports Illustrated.

Time didn't linger at what happened. They wanted to know why it happened....They wanted the globally significant. And the writing had to be of a high literary order.

It's quite a world of people he covers in depth, including Walter O'Malley. Muhammed Ali, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead, Pete Rose, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Henry Aaron, Al Davis, Jack Kent Cooke ("a man in a hurray...as unstoppable as a glacier"), and so many more.

He offers several brief anecdotes about Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, Ty Cobb, Magic Johnson, Sonny Liston, A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, Ted Williams, and on and on. Each tidbit is a gem of insider info into what makes that person unique, funny, talented, or ultra-driven.

The longest portions and best observations are reserved for the sports themselves that he loves: 

• Golf -
• Golf is the most maddening of games....The bleeding is internal in this sport.

• Auto racing - 
• [column headline] Gentlemen, Start Your Coffins 

• Baseball - 
• Baseball was always loath to enter the twentieth century. Baseball will always be three of more decades behind the rest of society. That's part of its charm.

• Boxing - 
• Jake LaMotta used to say he fought Sugar Ray Robinson six times and won all but five of them.

• Basketball -
• At the college and high school level, it used to be just something to go through to get to the dance afterward. The pros used to play wherever they could pass the hat and make bus money.....

There are pieced aplenty about my favorite Southern California teams (the Rams, Dodgers, Angels, Lakers, and Kings) and my boyhood baseball idols: Maury Wills (companion to Doris Day, who knew?), Jim Gilliam, Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Steve Garvey, and Tommy Lasorda. 

I liked baseball. It was the right mix of competition, contemplation and calibration for me. A ball park is still one of the great relaxing venues. It is a great place for the leather-lunged fan to work out his aggressions but there is an undertone of "I'm just kidding' in the baseball fan's torrent of abuse. 

There is a really funny chapter detailing his columns which contained disparaging reflections about the cities hosting sporting events that he was covering.

• Long Beach, CA - The seaport of Iowa

• Los Angeles - Underpoliced and oversexed. Its architecture has been (accurately) described as "Early Awful"

• Philadelphia - A town that would boo a cancer cure...a place that even the British gave up without a fight.

• Oakland, CA - You had to pay fifty cents to go from Oakland to San Francisco. Coming to Oakland from San Francisco was free... that's all you have to know about Oakland.

• Cincinnati - If the Russians ever attacked, they would bypass Cincinnati, as it looked as if it had already been taken and destroyed.

There are some serious portions as well. He devotes a chapter each to his onset of blindness, his son's battle with drugs, and the death of his beloved wife. All are presented with genuine emotion and thoughtfulness as he contemplates the reasons behind these situations and his own role in each.

If you are a sports fan or just an admirer of clever, witty, insightful, and always humorous writing, I highly recommend getting to know Jim Murray and his brilliant observations of the games of the world.

There is no cult in the world like a busload of fans on their way to a home game....The home team wins, the world's gonna be all right. Food tastes better. Wives look prettier. Work gets easier. 

Happy reading. 

 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Murray, Jim.. The Jim Murray Collection.   

The best collection of his columns covering baseball, boxing, tennis, hockey, strikes, and sport figures.

 

The Apprentice

Pepin, Jacques. The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen. New York: Houghton Mifflin 2003. Print.

First Sentences:

My mother made it sound like a great adventure.

Description:

Although I know next to nothing about food and its preparation, I still can appreciate quality writing and interesting, real-life stories from someone at the very top of this profession. Therefore, I highly recommend Jacques Pepin's autobiography, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen for a glimpse into the world of kitchens, training, restaurants, and innovation by a renowned chef.

Pepin's mother opened a simple restaurant, Le Pelican, in rural France with a few recipes, no business experience, and certainly no restaurant training. Here Pepin and his brother Roland learned how to cook, clean, wait tables, and all other roles necessary to a professional enterprise. And where he learned to love cooking and restaurante, although his brother hated that life.

Pepin left school at 13 for Paris, boldly getting a position at Le Grand Hotel de l'Europe. More on-the-job training, growth, and then moving on to other restaurants. He climbs from being a gopher called "P'tit" [Kid] to tending a stove, an honor recognized when the chef finally drops the nickname and calls him by his real name, "Jacques." He moves up to be the commis [chef assistant] and finally head chef. Pepin brings readers into each kitchen and their head chefs, carefully describing the environment of a first-class restaurant and the tasks necessary to produce the highest quality food. 

There are humorous stories as well, as when the very young Pepin was sent by the head chef to several restaurants to pick up their "machine a dessosser les poulets [chicken-boning machine] from another restaurant. Each location had an excuse for not having that machine and sent him along to another location, over and over until Pepin returned sadly empty-handed to his chef. Only then did he realize there was no such machine and he had passed an initiation into the restaurant family. In another story, Pepin's love of juicy pears is tested as he sneaks one of the chef's "des poires avocat" [avocado pears], biting into the leathery skin and hard seed of an avocado for the first time.

Later, Pepin travels to New York and contrasts the restaurant standards and chefs with those from France. His experiences lead him in the 1960s to, of all places, Howard Johnson's restaurants to help them upgrade the quality of their food and make it consistent in all their one thousand restaurants, a unique concept at the time. Instead of cooking for only a few restaurant patrons, Pepin now learned how to prepare clam chowder, a HoJo specialty, in stockpots of 500 or 1000 gallons.

Story after story are simply told as if Pepin is sitting next to you recalling his life. He has a charming writing style that fully reveal the picture he is painting:

Then there was [the chef's] look, a look that will recur in my nightmares as long as I live, not so much a look of anger as one of disdain, a gaze that lasted but a fraction of a second, yet made it clear that your pathetic little error was far beneath the level of his contempt. 

From cooking for Charles de Gaulle to working with Julia Child and every other great chef, from writing the classic book on the exacting techniques of preparing and cooking to traveling the world conducting cooking workshops and television shows, Pepin shows he is a giant in the kitchen and the world of cooking. Highly recommended for lovers of food, kitchen life,and fine writing.

Happy reading. 

Fred

(See more recommended books)
________________________________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Fechtor, Jessica. Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home. 

After a chef suffers an unexpected aneurysm, she rediscovers her love of cooking and eating. The book is filled with beautiful writing, recipes, and stories of the joy and struggles in her life. (previously reviewed here) 

Gaffingan, Jim. Food: A Love Story

The opposite end of the food spectrum. Stand-up comedian Gaffigan is a self-proclaimed "Eatie," who will eat and enjoy simple items like hamburgers. He reviews food choices in the United State and some international cuisines, as well as comments on several restaurants both ordinary and pretentious. Very funny. (previously reviewed here)

Britannia: Rowing Alone Across the Pacific

Fairfax, John. Britannia: Rowing Alone Across the Atlantic. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1971. Print.

First Sentences:

"Seven! Seven out!"

"Seven! Seven out!" Once more the recollection of those fateful words brought a savage curse to my lips; and the sight of the dark, majestic mass of Buckingham Palace, invoking visions of untold splendors within as it loomed in the mist of that chilly winter's night, did nothing to mitigate my fury.

Description:

John Fairfax is a man prone to whims. He calls himself a "professional adventurer," taking on menial jobs to finance the exotic challanges he dreams up. One such brainstorm in 1966 was to row a boat solo across the Pacific Ocean from England to the United States. With only a bit of sailing experience "as a pirate" on a fishing boat and no skill in rowing, no boat, and no financial backing (he's lost his stake gambling as in the quote above), he forges ahead anyways toward his goal. The resulting preparations and actual voyage are documented in his book, Britannia: Rowing Alone Across the Atlantic.

He talks Uffa Fox, England's premier boat-builder, into designing the perfect open-sea boat. Fox's creation, The Britannia, is 25 feet long with a rubberized self-righting chamber so the boat cannot capsize, self-drains any sea water from waves that crash over the sides, and has square oar-locks to assure perfect rowning style with minimal effort to position the oars for each stroke.

But why take on this task? It is the quest that catches his attention. He wants to be the first to row solo, as it had been done by a two-man boat once before.

I hate rowing.... [But then] why row across the Atlantic? Because, with a bit of know-how, almost anybody can sail, but I was after a battle against nature at its most primitive and raw. 

The actual voyage is fascinating. Fairfax recorded in his daily problems of storms, lack of sleep, sharks, sickness, loneliness, rowing time (over 12 hours per day), contrary winds, and almost being run over by passing boats. Navigation was by the stars and sun rather than computers, so cloudy days were problematic, as were unexpected currents and a balky radio antennae that kept him cut off from friends and family in London. He tossed out most of his food for taking up too much space and being disgustingly unflavorful, choosing to rely on spear fishing instead. Much of his success was determined by a Ronson lighter, the sole source of fire to start his tiny burner and cook food.

Fairfax is a survivor, a confident man willing to take chances to achieve his goal to reach the United States alive and in precisely the location he intended. No drifting around or being towed during the final 100 miles as he was tempted to do. 

I loved following his adventures, his matter-of-fact style of solving problems as well as his anger over daily misfortunes, like when dolphins attacked and ate all the fish that had been following his boat. A reader never feels any obstacle will prove too great to stop him and end his quest, and [spoiler alert] of course he reaches America exactly as planned. A true adventure, matched only by his next rowing trip, this time across the Pacific, as recounted in his next book, Oars Across the Pacific. Can't wait to read that one as well.

Happy reading. 

Fred

(See more recommended books)
________________________________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Fairfax, John and Cook, Sylvia. Oars Across the Pacific

Fairfax rows across another ocean, this time the Pacific, this adventure undertaking with girlfriend Sylvia Cook.